Technology:

What's the latest? Office programs on the Web, writing, calendering , and so forth right from your Web browser (preferably Firefox ; does anybody still use IE?). I'm writing this in a program called "Zohowriter" from, of all places, www.zohowriter.com. No, this is not an advertisement.

Doing more things right from the browser seems to be where computing is heading. Microsoft recognized this a long time ago, although they fought it vigorously. Back in the 1990s, Microsoft set out to deliberately destroy Netscape, remember? That was because they recognized what the Netscape folks had realized. You might not even need an operating system, just a simple way to get to the Web, in order to do most of your computing needs.

You may have heard already that Microsoft, too, is trying to develop its latest Office program as an online set of tools. So far, they've had what amounts to a monopoly on the office programs, which, along with their operating system, has made Uncle Bill so rich that he's finally had to go into partial retirement so that he can figure out how to spend all of those billions he accumulated. (Let's hope he stays in touch with Jimmy Carter on that one.) The big question will be if they can maintain their huge economic advantage in this format.